Steve Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama for inventing the first digital camera back in 1975. There is a nice story in the Washington Post about this with some of the technical details on the camera (it was large, heavy and the sensor was 0.01 megapixel). See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207556.html for the story and a couple of pictures of the camera.

Now and than a shoe box of negatives or images are found with images of historical importance. But what about that Mac OS 9 formatted IDE disk with raw files from that ancient Nikon some of us may had.